I enlisted in the Navy and left for boot camp at Great Lakes, IL in 1967. In 1968, I was an AQFAN training at the NAS in Millington, TN. I was attending night classes at the University of TN in Memphis, TN adding to my undergraduate credits that I had accumulated in 1965-1967 at Butler University in Indianapolis, ID. I was staying at a H…
I enlisted in the Navy and left for boot camp at Great Lakes, IL in 1967. In 1968, I was an AQFAN training at the NAS in Millington, TN. I was attending night classes at the University of TN in Memphis, TN adding to my undergraduate credits that I had accumulated in 1965-1967 at Butler University in Indianapolis, ID. I was staying at a Holiday Inn Junior in Memphis the morning that MLK was assassinated. I hitch hiked from Memphis to Millington that day. From Millington, I transferred to VF-101 at fighter training squadron at NAS Oceania in Virginia Beach, VA. We trained new pilots for their air craft qualifications to serve in WestPac during the war.
Living on Naval bases in Illinois, Tennessee, and eventually Virginia was a social and political adjustment for a young person who had been born in Worcester, MA and lived in the east before beginning an undergraduate education in Indiana. After being discharged from the Navy, I returned to Northampton, MA in 1971 to finish my undergraduate degree in English at the University of MA in Amherst. U-Mass in Amherst, MA was not a Cambridge, MA anti-war atmosphere. Obviously, neither were the atmospheres of Tennessee nor Virginia. The GI Bill VA benefits paid for the rest of my undergraduate education. My war experience was very different than some of my fellow South High School students who went to war in the Pacific and did not survive to return to Massachusetts when their military duty was completed.
I enlisted in the Navy and left for boot camp at Great Lakes, IL in 1967. In 1968, I was an AQFAN training at the NAS in Millington, TN. I was attending night classes at the University of TN in Memphis, TN adding to my undergraduate credits that I had accumulated in 1965-1967 at Butler University in Indianapolis, ID. I was staying at a Holiday Inn Junior in Memphis the morning that MLK was assassinated. I hitch hiked from Memphis to Millington that day. From Millington, I transferred to VF-101 at fighter training squadron at NAS Oceania in Virginia Beach, VA. We trained new pilots for their air craft qualifications to serve in WestPac during the war.
Living on Naval bases in Illinois, Tennessee, and eventually Virginia was a social and political adjustment for a young person who had been born in Worcester, MA and lived in the east before beginning an undergraduate education in Indiana. After being discharged from the Navy, I returned to Northampton, MA in 1971 to finish my undergraduate degree in English at the University of MA in Amherst. U-Mass in Amherst, MA was not a Cambridge, MA anti-war atmosphere. Obviously, neither were the atmospheres of Tennessee nor Virginia. The GI Bill VA benefits paid for the rest of my undergraduate education. My war experience was very different than some of my fellow South High School students who went to war in the Pacific and did not survive to return to Massachusetts when their military duty was completed.